Told You He Could Deliver
Even as the year turned and the Lunar New holiday drew near, the message boards were still burning hot over Yoon Jay's Best Actor win. The news articles brimmed with reactions calling it a shockingly bold decision from the network, and analytical posts pondered how on earth a rookie could walk away with the top prize without even playing the lead role.
He earned it, sure. But giving it to Kim Hyunjun instead? That's just absurd.
Compared to Yoon Jay, it wasn't as if Kim Hyunjun was the better actor. Choi Mina — who had already fallen so completely for Yoon Jay that she'd bought every piece of his merchandise and now ran a fan account at full throttle — started typing a reply, then stopped herself.
It would all blow over soon enough. Give it time and something else would hog the spotlight. Sure enough, people were already saying a network acting award didn't carry much prestige anyway — a sure sign this wave had crested. Once the endless award-season ranking posts came flooding in, the Best Actor controversy would be buried in no time.
Choi Mina logged onto social media and rewatched her edited Yoon Jay highlight reel from the awards ceremony.
Mmm. Honestly, I didn't expect him to win something this big...
God, he's gorgeous. What actor is this good-looking? Every one I've stanned turned out to be trash — surely this one's different.
(To my family in America who has always cheered me on, to my twin brother and sister who help me in every way, and to everyone from Along Along...)
The staff cheering so loudly when their names were called — people who love him that much wouldn't turn out to be trash... Choi Mina glanced at the clock. There wasn't much longer until The Garden of Evil dropped. She wrote a post in her community.
Since it was an OTT release, nobody would be airing it for them — they'd have to seek it out themselves — but with Park Hyunseung, a fairly famous director in film circles, joining hands with Moon Changmin, an actor renowned for his craft, plenty of people were waiting for the premiere.
What was more, word from the press screenings was that the entire cast — leads, supporting roles, and cameo appearances alike — were throwing an acting party. People seized on the words cameo appearance, because the only name known to be making a cameo in The Garden of Evil was Yoon Jay.
And so, launched on a swell of expectation, The Garden of Evil opened with Kim Yeonseok — played by Moon Changmin — being handed a terminal diagnosis in a hospital room.
"At this rate... I doubt you'll make it past six months. But it can improve, so if we begin treatment—"
"Skip the treatment."
Kim Yeonseok was a former National Intelligence Service agent. He'd devoted more than half his life to his country, and all he had left was a pitifully short lifespan and a thin bank balance. He didn't even own a home. His family had always believed he was just a humble salesman, and his daughter was about to start elementary school. Tuition and a dozen other expenses were about to come pouring in.
What happens to them when I die?
His work had already left him neglecting his family, and now they'd have to weather the death of the household's breadwinner on top of it. As he left the hospital with his head in a fog, a band of con artists closed in on him.
"Hello there. You're Kim Yeonseok, I presume?"
"I am. And you are...?"
"Well, this is who I am."
Kim Yeonseok, who had been staring blankly at the waters of the Han River, accepted the business card the mystery man held out. Park Jongwon, a director at LJ Corporation. They were launching a new venture and needed a figurehead CEO — would he care to lend them his name?
"Of course, we intend to compensate you handsomely for the loan of your name."
Frankly, it reeked of a scam. But in the face of the money on offer, even suspicion had to take a back seat. That sum could buy a house, could see his daughter all the way through university.
I'm dying anyway...
That's why they came to me, isn't it. After agonizing over it, Kim Yeonseok accepted the terms.
He lent his name, and with the payment he bought a house under his wife's. Just as he was settling in to spend what remained of his life in peace with his family, the police came and dragged him away.
"Kim Yeonseok. You are the CEO of LJ Corporation, correct?"
Fraud, embezzlement, breach of trust — the charges stacked against him were endless. He'd anticipated this much and signed the contract anyway, but the timing came far too early. With so little time left to him, wanting to spend his final days at his family's side, he played dumb.
"...I know nothing about any of this."
"Come on, Kim Yeonseok. Your name is Kim Yeonseok, isn't it? Can't you see it right there on the paperwork — CEO, in your name?"
After the police interrogation, thrown into a detention cell, he found himself in danger of being "suicided." A knife-edge scene of pure tension — and yet, true to his former-agent credentials, Kim Yeonseok slipped out of the deadly situation, then groveled shamelessly at the killer's very boots, begging for his life.
"Kill me if you want."
"I'm dying soon anyway. I'll confess quietly and go to prison, so—"
He'd steeled himself for death ever since the terminal diagnosis, but with the thing actually upon him, terror took hold. In his active years he'd been untouchable, but this early retirement had turned him into a tiger with no teeth, and all he had left was his family. A tangle of emotions crushed together, and he begged — pathetically, desperately.
Moon Changmin was one of those actors whose sheer skill could chew up and swallow any role — lead or supporting — until his scene partners felt the weight of it. Pair him with any top star you liked, and audiences would walk away talking about Moon Changmin's performance and nothing else. Which was precisely why The Garden of Evil had no famous cast members beyond him.
"Honey, what on earth is going on!"
"I'm sorry. But it's over — let's end it here."
He divorced his wife and walked into prison shouldering every one of their crimes. Day after day, living only for the day he would die, Kim Yeonseok discovers that his body is perfectly healthy. The terminal diagnosis had been a lie — the work of a doctor bribed by LJ Corporation.
"You... fucking bastards!"
The knowledge that he'd been trapped sent him over the edge.
Before long, after raging through the prison until they threw him in solitary, Kim Yeonseok sits watching the sun set and rise through the narrow window — and with the shifting light, his expression changes, bit by bit. From chaos to something bloodless and unyielding. It shows, visually, that Kim Yeonseok has awakened.
And just as he begins plotting his escape, a visitor arrives from his old employer.
"You look a far cry from your old self."
"You used me up and threw me away, and now you come crawling back — for what?"
"We have a proposal for you."
The state had been keeping a close watch on the syndicate of con artists responsible for a crime of staggering scale. They wanted to use Moon Changmin's character to take down LJ Corporation — and the organization looming above it.
"Fine. I like it. Use me all you want."
"I should mention upfront: all I can do is get you out. Once you're outside, you're an escaped convict with a wanted notice on your head."
"Then get me out fast. Once I've killed those bastards, I'm dying anyway."
Back in society, Kim Yeonseok starts by hunting down the doctor who diagnosed him for revenge, then closes in, step by step, on the true face of the organization that dragged him into the mire. Movie-grade chase sequences and pulse-pounding direction raised the drama's polish to another level.
"Did you find out what's really behind it?"
"There's someone called Baek Jinri. The young chairman of an emerging religion called Jeonchonggyo—"
"A cult?"
"Yes."
"That guy is the power backing LJ Corporation?"
And so, only around the midpoint of the series, as Moon Changmin seized the story by the collar and dragged it forward, did Yoon Jay finally appear.
At first he's shown in comparatively benign form, delivering a speech to a crowd — proclaiming his doctrine with the declaration that we were dealt our births without consent.
"Chairman!"
"Look this way, Chairman!"
Weaponizing that beautiful face, he drew in followers explosively, leading his legion of believers like an idol singer at the peak of fame.
"Tch. Filthy."
The man who had paraded crowds around like a campaign rally slides into his car. Baek Jinri, scrubbing raw at the hands the believers had clutched with a wet wipe, gazes out the window. The pristine white suit — and the car he always rode in, yet still scrubbed spotless down to every seam. It told you everything: the man had a pathological need for cleanliness.
"Where shall we head, Chairman?"
"To the farm."
At the place they called the farm, everything you'd assumed about Baek Jinri — a mere cult leader, nothing more — flipped on its head.
"This is grace."
He looked utterly rapturous, like a man high on the real thing — and yet the dialogue that followed let slip that he never touched a drop of it, revealing that Baek Jinri's state was pure, uncut madness.
As Kim Yeonseok tore down Baek Jinri's businesses one by one, severing his hands and feet as he closed in, the chairman's madness swelled larger and larger.
"Hahaha! You really think you can stop me?!"
Coming right on the heels of Moon Changmin's suffocatingly overwhelming performance, he didn't lose an ounce of momentum. If anything, his presence never once yielded to Moon Changmin's. He was a mere special cameo — yet the suspicion that he was the true entity Kim Yeonseok was chasing never even had a chance to surface.
And so the story hurtled toward its ending. After a crucial deal collapses at Moon Changmin's hands, Baek Jinri interrogates one of his underlings.
"What should we do with this man?"
"I— I'm so sorry, Chairman."
Baek Jinri picks up a baseball bat lying abandoned in the corner and circles the underling, swinging it like a maniac out of a period epic. Taken purely as a single shot, the scene would look almost comical — but with all that stacked-up narrative behind it, it lands as something far more terrifying instead.
"Hello there?"
Then came the scene even Moon Changmin couldn't help but falter in. Filtered through the camera lens, the set itself had been less intense — but the shocking atmosphere refused to fade. It snatched the breath from viewers' throats and made them avert their eyes without meaning to.
The reaction feed, which had been sprinting without pause since the release, froze for a moment — then exploded.
Kwon Minjae, who had binged The Garden of Evil in one breathless sitting, hit pause at that very scene too. He'd heard from Lee Seo-won that the role of Baek Jinri had originally been meant for him.
But when he'd learned they were giving it to a rookie instead, he hadn't thought much of it. It was a cameo, after all — barely any weight to it, nothing he'd hungered for.
If I had played Baek Jinri...
Could he have delivered a performance like that? Kwon Minjae felt a chill crawl up his spine, far too late.
The aftershocks of The Garden of Evil lasted longer than Yoon Jay expected. A single rapturous line Baek Jinri breathed at the farm had turned into a full-blown catchphrase.
"Isn't this what grace truly is?"
"This is what grace is!"
It had begun modestly, as the caption on a social media post by Yoon Do-hwa and Yoon Do-jun, who had binged the show the instant it dropped. But the drama itself was so polished and drew in so many viewers that soon the phrase was turning up everywhere — variety shows, YouTube, social media, you name it.
And it didn't stop at a catchphrase. On Cookietok — the short-form video app with a massive global user base — a video splicing the scene of Baek Jinri whirling his baseball bat in a frenzied dance before accidentally bashing an underling's head open with a famous pop track exploded into the spotlight.
Then came the imitators. Soon every trending view count was swallowed by videos of people copying Baek Jinri's madman dance. In Korea it was being called the Madman Challenge — the name did sound a little off, admittedly.
"...Told you the guy really knew how to deliver."
Kwak Dohyun, Astra's managing director, who had been monitoring it all, let out a hearty chuckle.